Sean Esopenko

Snowy Day – Bought Mamiya RB67 Pro-S

December 12, 2010

This is some of the junk on the acreage here.  There’s a lot of subject matter here and I could probably produce an entire series on what’s just on the acreage.

“Poulin” hasn’t owned that bus since some time in the early 90′s and it’s now used as a storage shed by my father in law.  We get a kick out of the fact he put the “no trespassing” sign on his bus and not at the property’s entrance.

I pulled the trigger on a Mamiya RB67 Pro-S system.  While sharpness and tonality for 4×5 have been great I’ve been desiring a system that would still have adequate image quality and speed up my shooting in the field.  A medium format SLR system seemed like the ticket and I kept my eyes on the used market for a while, eventually deciding to snap up a Mamiya SLR camera and a few lenses.  The kit came with a 50mm F4.5 C and a 90mm F3.8 C.  Both of the lenses are multi-coated so I should get great results with colour.  I was worried about “mirror slap” from such a large camera but from the test shots today I didn’t see anything of the sort.  I used some expired Agfa 400 film and a monopod to play with it.  My slowest exposure was 1/30th and at 100% I couldn’t see a trace of “mirror slap” in any of the shots.

Since I only have an incident meter I figured I’d let the hi-lights land where they’d like and meter for the subject matter.  It was pretty gray and drab and  I wanted to have lots of contrast on the subjects in the snow so I metered for them and gave an extra minute or so of development.  I never shot with Agfa 400 so I guestimated how to process it and developed the shots in D76 1:1 for about 13 minutes.  The results, when scanned in, were not bad and surprisingly better than I thought they would be.  I find that D76 1:1 always seems to have good accutance (sharpness).  People complain of the Agfa film being “low contrast” but that also tranlates to “high dynamic range” so I think it depends on the situation whether it’s helpful or not.  The film had a lot of inward curl and I ended up clamping a piece of negative on the negative part-way down during the drying process to keep from curling in on itself.

It was pretty exciting to be able to bang through a roll of 120 in about 15 minutes.  It’s even cooler to develop 10 exposures in 30 minutes or less compared to the 1-2 hours work to develop 1-6 4×5 shots.  I can’t tweak the development for individual shots but I never have the time to develop individual shots anyways.  The files are quite a bit smaller than 4×5 scans.  At 2400 dpi the 6×7 scans to about 33 megapixels while 4×5′s end up around 90-100 megapixels or so.  Scans no longer take 12 minutes, however, and I can have 8-12 images open at once and it doesn’t max out my system’s 8GB ram.  I can only edit two 4×5′s at the max with my beefy workstation.  I don’t print anything larger than 16×20 in the darkroom and I’m quite confident in my exposure and development abilities so I think medium format will be just fine for my fine-art b&w work.  I foresee a lot of time being spent with this Mamiya SLR system and the Wista 4×5 field camera will be reserved for when I’m revisiting a site to really squeeze as much out of the subject matter as possible.

Update (December 12th, 2010. 3:27 PM MST):

The guy who sold me the camera included a pack of Impossible Project b&w polaroid film which he said was about 1000 ISO.  The Impossible Project is a company which acquired a bunch of factory equipment from Polaroid to continue making positive Polaroid film.  I didn’t like the browned look of the positive prints so I scanned in the negative portion.  The positive image of a polaroid is actually a contact print from a negative that usually gets thrown away.  I scanned in the negative and reversed it to get the image above.  The tonal quality is quite rich and the look is nice and “dirty” without looking like something produced from one of those stupid iPhone lomography apps.  I might work with this in the future for works of people.  We’ll see.

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